Caves of Faribault

About the Cheese

Our cheese is made from rBST free raw cow’s milk. Only three other ingredients are added. The AmaBlu® blue cheese recipe was created here at the caves in 1936 by Felix Frederiksen. It is the first blue cheese made and marketed nationally from the first site of American made blue cheese.

Today we faithfully follow the original recipe, carefully making cheese by hand in traditional open vats. There are no artificial additives or flavor enzymes – only Grade A milk, traditional starter culture (cheese ripening bacteria), salt and Penicillium rocquefortii (to create the blue veining) are added. The cheese are hand salted then cured and aged to their full potential.

About the Caves

In 1854 a German immigrant named Gottfried Fleckenstein began using the natural sandstone caves along the Straight River for brewing and storing beer. The largest natural cave (still in use today) was enlarged in 1936, then entirely new caves were hand hewn from the sandstone rock beginning in 1938.

St. Peter sandstone has four unique properties: 1) as the beach sand washed out by the last glaciers, it is remarkably pure (99.9% pure quartzite; 2) water can freely move vertically and horizontally, so cave ceilings never drip; 3) it is self supporting in a Gothic arch, so no internal supports are normally needed; and 4) it is slightly acidic.